Personalization with Contentful: Powerful Strategies for CMOs

Personalization is not just a tactic—it’s a strategy powered by a deep understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences and the context of their visit. According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalization across channels, rewarding brands that deliver with their spending and loyalty. Companies that get personalization right generate 40% more revenue than those that don’t.

A foundation of content, behavioral analytics, and AI will support your real-time personalization strategy and help unlock the potential of your content with insights and tools to deliver curated content in real-time, at scale. Leading CMOs are leveraging tools that enable personalized experiences and allow marketing teams to rapidly build, measure, and optimize these experiences without dependency on developers.

This guide explores how CMOs accelerate their personalization strategies using the latest advancements in composable content management and artificial intelligence.

A CMO’s Opportunity: AI and Personalization

In the face of evolving expectations and innovative technologies such as generative AI (GenAI), CMOs have an opportunity to scale marketing efforts. However, while AI remains a significant opportunity, it is still cited among the top C-Suite challenges, alongside privacy concerns, changing worker expectations, and the need to increase internal efficiency. CMOs faced with hiring freezes and budget cuts need to find a way to adopt cutting-edge technology while also unlocking internal efficiency.

CMOs face pressure to drive growth with less while meeting increasingly complex consumer demands. New AI technology addresses critical pain points in attracting and retaining talent, streamlining marketing operations, and delivering personalization at scale to support the customer experience and drive growth.

How to Measure Personalization Success

Personalization is the ability to know your customers and to deliver engaging digital experiences: product recommendations, search and product discovery, marketing campaigns, banner displays, CTA prompts, and omnichannel orchestration with a combination of content tools and customer insights. For CMOs, personalization has gone from a competitive advantage to a priority. You have to deliver hyper-relevant content while maintaining operational efficiency and brand consistency. And you have to do so consistently, with accuracy, and with seamless fluidity as customers cross channels.

The key goals of personalization are to boost the following:

• Customer Engagement: Tailored content creates deeper connections, greater interactions, and more time spent with the brand.
• Customer Value: Better alignment with customer needs and wants leads to higher conversion, order value, and lifetime value.
• Operational Efficiency: Targeted messaging means marketing efforts are focused on receptive audiences and maximum ROI. AI automations remove manual efforts from data analytics.
• Brand Loyalty: Relevant and meaningful interactions build trust, repeat business, and long-term customer loyalty.

Represented as metrics, you can measure personalization efforts across the following key performance indicators (KPI):

The Challenges with Personalization and AI

Personalization at scale is challenging. Data privacy, operational bottlenecks, budget constraints, and technological limitations can get in the way. While implementing personalization across multiple touchpoints and markets, the following complexities can arise:

• Operational Overload: Customizing content for multiple segments can overload marketing resources.
• Brand Inconsistency: Different personalization efforts across channels or between visits can dilute brand messaging and confuse customers.
• Technological Constraints: Disconnected data sources (e.g., CRM, CMS, CDP, analytics, AI tools) and legacy systems paint an incomplete picture of the customer, inhibiting real-time personalization at scale.
• Insight Challenges: Large volumes of data about customer behavior (browsing, purchase history, visit frequency, interactions, channel preferences) and demographics can be difficult to interpret without advanced tools and AI
• Data Privacy, Compliance, and Equity: Establishing transparent policies on the gathering and using of customer data in compliance with global data regulations and ensuring segmentation is free of bias.

To overcome operational challenges and unlock scalability, you need a robust and flexible content infrastructure supporting seamless personalization without compromising efficiency or compliance. Here’s where Contentful steps in as a game-changer.

How Contentful Empowers Scalable Personalization

Traditional content management systems (CMS) are designed to deliver a single universal experience to all customers and channels, hindering personalization efforts. In contrast, a modern headless CMS is a decoupled solution that optimizes how content is delivered across channels and is composable, empowering brands to combine a suite of tools to shape and deliver personalized experiences at scale.

As a leading headless and composable platform, Contentful unifies content with powerful and intuitive tools to create, test, and optimize experiences and deliver them seamlessly across channels. It is a composable platform designed to integrate with an ecosystem of powerful capabilities and enhanced with integrated AI to optimize marketing processes and no-code tools to quickly design and launch new experiences.

Created for the future of digital experience management, Contentful recently acquired Ninetailed, providing a plug-and-play capability to drive personalization efforts from within the Contentful platform. Ninetailed is an AI-powered personalization solution empowering marketers to identify segments, experiment with, and analyze experiences faster and more efficiently, all in the no-code environment Contentful marketers already know and love. With Ninetailed, you can tap into your data, creating a future-proof strategy to meet customer expectations amidst a changing privacy environment.

Take Ruggable, for example – Ruggable is a home decor company that offers innovative, washable, and customizable rug systems for modern homes. Ruggable leveraged Contentful and Ninetailed to cut personalization efforts from a day to under an hour.

The biggest challenge with expanding internationally is that we wanted each experience to look and feel like an authentic, native website — not just an arm of our original U.S. experience. So, for Ruggable, that meant creating a fully translated site first and then going a step further to offer different content. Today, we use Contentful for everything across our eight different storefronts in five different languages, all through the same Contentful space. It’s exciting, we can spin up an entirely new international website in under a month. We wanted to begin targeting these customers with different content and experiences so they could find the “right” rug. Ninetailed helped us segment these groups further and develop more granular journeys, boosting conversion rates by around 25% and CTR by 7%. Contentful unblocks our team. We don’t have to spend time setting things up in Contentful, other teams can manage it and are empowered to do so. Instead, we can spend our time improving the site experience, and improving the overall conversion of different pages.
-Daniel Graupensperger, Associated Director of Product Management at Ruggable

Contentful CMS Features for Personalization

Contentful gives you the tools to create and optimize personalized content in a value-generating environment. The following details how the Contentful headless CMS architecture and composable capabilities can support your personalization strategy:

1. Advanced Content Modeling

Your content strategy is central to helping to support personalization efforts. Contentful enables you to create a structured content model that will make it easier to adjust to customer expectations. Here’s how:

• Atomic Content Modeling: Break down your content into small, reusable pieces. This allows for more flexibility in building personalized experiences.
• Using content modeling in personalization: Structuring your content into small pieces (statistics, case studies) allows you to quickly pull in content when creating new experiences.
• Composable Content Components: Create smaller, reusable content t components (e.g., blocks of texts, CTAs, forms, image formats) and content types (landing page, banner ad) that can be reused across multiple channels to increase efficiency and consistency.
• Governance: Create controls that enable marketers to deliver compliant on-brand experiences in a no-code environment.
• Metadata and Tagging: Use Contentful’s metadata to tag content for easy retrieval and personalization.

2. Composable, API-First Approach

Contentful is a composable platform, leveraging an API-first strategy to make it easy for developers to integrate with personalization tools and technologies (including Ninetailed). What this means:

• Single source of truth: Connect to CRM systems, eCommerce platforms, and analytics tools to create a single source of truth, enabling personalization to leverage real-time customer data.
• Powerful integrations: Connect to powerful analytics, analytics, and eCommerce tools
• Automations: Workflows created in the user interface can trigger changes in the backend quickly and easily.

3. Omnichannel Content Distribution

Reaching your audience means delivering content where they are—social media, website, in-store—and ensuring seamless experiences as customers travel between channels. Contentful streamlines and optimizes the process of delivering content experiences across all channels. The platform ensures:

• Customer Journeys: Create cohesive experiences that adapt to user behavior across all touchpoints.
• Consistent Messaging: Maintain brand integrity by ensuring a seamless flow between channels and customers receive consistent personalization offers across channels.
• Channel Optimization: Developers can create custom front-ends for each channel, optimizing content for every touchpoint.
• Scalable Expansion: Expand personalization to new channels or markets, ensuring your content strategy grows with your business goals.

4. Drive Impact and Efficiency with AI

Contentful CMS has robust AI capabilities to help support how your teams create and manage personalized content.

• Generate Content: Use GenAI to enhance and accelerate content development, accelerating personalization efforts across channels and locations.
• Workflow Support: Leverage automations to support workflows to get ideas out faster.
• Generate Images: Don’t let a lack of images or design resources slow down your efforts; use AI to create on-brand images.
• Automated Governance: Ensure all content adheres to brand standards.
• AI Personalization: Segment, target, and A/B test your personalized content with AI suggestions. [with Ninetailed]
• Automations: Deploy personalized content triggered by customer interactions or data signals without human intervention. [with Ninetailed].

5. Localization

Knowing and respecting cultural differences helps build content that speaks to local audiences. By using Contentful’s content modeling, you can:

• Manage Localized Content Efficiently: Manage multiple languages in one content hub and streamline translations with built-in tools.
• Adapt Content to Regional Preferences: Adjust messaging to local customs and consumer behavior.
• Increase Cultural Relevance: Create deeper connections by acknowledging and incorporating regional subtleties.
• Speed to Market: Reduce time-to-market for localized campaigns through content management.
• Maintain a Global Brand Consistency: Keep core messaging consistent while allowing for regional variations.

CMOs know that AI holds the key to meeting strategic initiatives, but Contentful holds the key to getting there faster and accelerating team performance at scale. As a headless CMS, Contentful is designed to support your long-term future needs, allowing you to build out a performance tool for your marketing needs.

Today, Contentful and Ninetailed together help unlock immediate capabilities to personalize content delivery at the micro-level, resulting in higher engagement and better customer experiences.

But personalization doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it requires an ecosystem where Contentful collaborates with other marketing tools to deliver a seamless and impactful user experience.

Creating a Personalization Ecosystem in Contentful

You must integrate your Contentful CMS with other marketing technologies for a robust personalization ecosystem to deliver a seamless customer experience. You need to put Contentful in a more extensive marketing tech stack to get the most out of the personalization strategy. Integrating Contentful customer data, marketing automation tools, and other systems allows you to sync your personalization across channels and create a cohesive customer experience. Here’s a quick look at how it happens:

1. Personalization engine

Perhaps it should go without saying that your first integration should be a personalization engine such as Ninetailed. This software is responsible for sophisticated segmentation and content testing (e.g., A/B testing), including:

• Audience Segmentation: Define audiences or leverage AI for more in-tune audience segment opportunities
• A/B Testing: Automate A/B testing to capture and refine the right message.
• Analytics: Understand the effectiveness of your personalization campaigns, looking granularly at each content component, audience segment, and experience version
• AI Boosts: Use a platform that offers AI suggestions (e.g., Ninetailed) to generate new ideas for personalized experiences.

2. Data: CDP or CRM and Marketing Automation

Integrating Contentful CMS with your customer data, either your customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management system (CRM), allows you to bring in more data sources to add value to your personalization efforts. By connecting Contentful to systems like Ninetailed, Salesforce, HubSpot, Bloomreach, or Marketo, you can:

• Use Real-Time Data: Use the latest customer data to segment your audience and test, personalize, and optimize content.
• Orchestrate Dynamic Campaigns: Automate content delivery when customers take action and increase relevance.
• Sync Data: Align content with up-to-date customer profiles for seamless experiences.

3. Analytics

Turn all that customer data into powerful insights with independent (e.g., Google Analytics) or integrated analytics (e.g., Ninetailed):

• Gather data: Gather closer insights about how your content is performing.
• Surface insights: Organize data into reports that are easy to understand.

4. Product Information Management (PIM) for eCommerce Personalization

Personalized product information increases the shopping experience and conversions. In eCommerce, product information must be precise and tailored to individual customer preferences. Managing and delivering personalization across multiple channels can be complex without the right tools.

By connecting Product Information Management (PIM) systems to Contentful, you can:

• Sync Product Data: To support the customer experience, keep product descriptions, pricing, and availability in sync and up to date across channels.
• Personalize Product Recommendations: Give product suggestions and up-sell or cross-sell options based on customer browsing and purchase history.

Partner with Contentful Experts: Net Solutions

To get the most out of Contentful, partner with experienced professional development teams who offer cohesive branding, storytelling, design, digital marketing, and development services to speed up implementation and optimization.
Read how we optimized content type usage from 75% to 25%, and reduced developer dependency for a global crypto leader.

As a certified partner for Contentful development services, Net Solutions offers:

Contentful Development Expertise

• Custom Content Modeling: Design custom content structures that are the foundation of personalization.
• Advanced Integration Services: Connect Contentful to your existing tech stack new tools such as Ninetails, ensuring you’re set up for success.
• Site Optimization: Improve site performance across mobile and social channels to reduce performance-related churn.
• Personalization Optimization: Our experts in user experience design can help set you up with a whole set of personalization opportunities that you can start off with and continue to refine.
• Replatforming: If you’re not yet on Contentful, we can help get you there!

Flexible Staffing

• Access to Specialized Talent: Use experienced developers and strategists without long-term commitments.
• Scalable Resource Allocation: Adjust team size and expertise based on project needs.
• Knowledge Transfer: Get your internal teams up to speed through collaboration and sharing best practices.

Marketing leaders have a simple brief: deliver experiences that resonate with consumers while being operationally efficient and brand-consistent. Contentful solves the challenge of scalable, flexible, and effective personalization across all channels – and we would love to help you get there.